


don't think i could forgive myself

by intimasea



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Character Death In Dream, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Past Character Death, Post-Canon, Post-War, anxiety written by someone with multiple diagnosed anxiety disorders, could be considered a character study, definitely a character study, implied PTSD, mentions of panic attacks and insomnia, not necessarily george/lee but also not not george/lee, sad gay yearning with maybe a happy ending idk bittersweet ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-14
Updated: 2020-11-14
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:21:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27564460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intimasea/pseuds/intimasea
Summary: Sometimes when it’s raining, George goes up to the roof and stands there looking up. He doesn’t have an explanation, not a real one. He could say that he’s looking for God, or searching for his brother’s love.
Relationships: Lee Jordan/George Weasley
Comments: 1
Kudos: 24





	don't think i could forgive myself

Sometimes when it’s raining, George goes up to the roof and stands there looking up. He doesn’t have an explanation, not a real one. He could say that he’s looking for God, or searching for his brother’s love. But that would be too easy, and too on the nose. Really, he just likes the way the rain feels on his cheeks after spending hours pouring over work that will never live up to his own standards… to Fred’s standards.

The rain makes him feel like he doesn’t have to be Just George anymore or the Living Twin, the rain allows him to just be. Without judgement. A girl told him that once, that the rain allows a person to exist without judgement because rain can’t judge, all it does is fall and wash away evidence of whatever small or momentous crime had occurred in the previous hours. That same girl also took him on a date to the Three Broomsticks in which George proceeded to daydream about the night he spent with Lee Jordan. He probably owed that girl a lot, now that he thinks about it. He used her in a way and even if rain can’t judge, George can certainly still judge himself.

Lately, ever since the war, certain sounds give him a pang of anxiety so intense that sometimes his knees buckle from the effort of having to stay standing and intact. That was one thing the rain couldn’t temporarily fix. If he heard a door slammed too hard on the streets below, or if a loud car horn went off somewhere in the distance, George couldn’t help whatever reaction came out of him. 

Sometimes it was crying, tears running down his cheeks alongside the rain, the two identical in nature. So much so that George can often imagine that while his tears are his own, the rain is Fred’s and that his brother that he misses more than life is crying with him, hurting without him just like George. Their emotions always ran together in unexpected ways, a side effect of sharing a womb for nine months and sharing a life for twenty years. 

Other times it was the shaking, his hands scratching against the material of his brother’s favourite forest green corduroy pants. The shaking was George’s least favorite thing that carried on from the war. He had never really had problems with anxiety before the war, which he knows now to have been a great privilege. Now all he is is a walking, talking after-school special about the effects of war and loss. A goddamn forty-five minute documentary for a university psychology course. 

That same girl that taught George about the rain while he strung her along because he was too afraid of himself slapped him once too. While she was breaking up with him. She slapped him so hard that he still had a red handprint on his cheek while he was sneaking under a cordoned off section of the quidditch stadiums under construction. He was supposed to be meeting Lee then, so they could do the things that no one else could see. But Lee never showed up. George discovered later that it was because one of their friends in Ravenclaw had spontaneously decided to pash Lee in front of the whole school, or at least most of the school, because she had been dared.

Lee and that girl started seriously dating, and that was the first time George thought that maybe he really wasn’t everything that he thought he was. It used to be, back then, that when he was with Lee he felt all of the things that people said about him could be true. That he was the better twin, the nicer one, the more industrious one. Perhaps that he was worth being seen apart from Fred, away from his matching set persona. 

They had never been together after Lee and the girl started dating back in school, not even after they broke up. And George hadn’t really had a serious relationship since if he was being honest. He used to date girls to prove something to himself or to the people around him, he could never quite figure that part out. The why was always hard for him, it still is in a way. No one ever knew that he wasn’t interested in any of them, wasn’t in love with any of them. He couldn’t really be in love with anyone when he wasn’t in love with himself.

There had been boys, secret ones that he would give flowers to and dress up at night to have dates in clubs that George knew for sure no one he knew would frequent. He even was given flowers too, he keeps them still in a box under his bed alongside all of Fred’s stuff that he couldn’t bear to part with.

But the thing is that George hasn’t felt much since he and Lee stopped whatever they were, without even the slightest discussion about it. The last time he felt too much was when Fred died and it was all still so fresh and groundbreaking in a way that made him believe that maybe it was his destiny to die too. Now there’s just anxiety and a lack of sleep, there isn’t anything else left in him. There isn’t anything to give, let alone allow himself to experience.

Two and a half years. Two and a half years and all George has to show for it is a failing prank shop and thirty-five pounds held in a Muggle bank account. No more pretty boys that would give him flowers and pay for his ridiculous teas that he liked to collect from tea shops all over London. No more Lee to smile and wink and proceed to make an obscene gesture that only Lee could make into a friendly greeting between two people who definitely had never slept together or once even loved each other, even if that love was barely a pinprick in the big scheme of things. There is no more consciousness to his life, just a man who should have died two and a half years ago but instead lives his life like a ghost with a heartbeat.

Now the truth is that all he has is some bullshit fluff about the rain that a girl who slapped him told him while out on a truly boring date and the memory of a boy’s lips on him when he hasn’t even seen that boy in two years and hasn’t kissed him in five. 

A day at Bill and Fleur’s is like spending a day in a waking dream, George isn’t even sure he knows exactly how it all went by so fast because he barely even remembers it. He knows he drank copious amounts of black tea with too much milk and that he sat with his hands on Fleur’s pregnant baby feeling his niece kick hard at the sound of her dad’s voice. The experience was pleasant, George knows this, but it was also something that won’t stick in his mind.

He doesn’t know why, he knows that feeling his niece kick for the first time should be something that stays with him for the rest of his life. But lately he’s been basically a corpse walking around living the life of a person that doesn’t exist anymore, George Weasley without Fred Weasley is a hollow husk of a person with little left to give. 

On his walk home after apparating back to the Leaky Cauldron, George thinks continuously about a poem he read once because one of the girls he dated that his parents particularly loved had recommended it. One of the lines in the poem read something like ‘I eat men like air.’ That line had sat inside his stomach for so long and still resides there, imbedded into his stomach lining waiting to be done away with by stomach acid and his own power of will. But it hasn’t left him yet, he doesn’t think it will any time soon.

He knows that it is likely about women, about how men tend to take so much from women that this woman has decided to take men from themselves. He thinks that it’s a powerful idea or motif, whatever one would call it in the poetry world. But still, George can’t help but feel that perhaps the quote could be his, too. Not that he’s a closeted gay men that devours other gay men for his own pleasure, he isn’t. In fact he actually find great discomfort with things surrounding sex, the motions of it have always felt inauthentic to him. George feels like the quote is his because he, too, has been devoured by the world.

The world asked him what he was made of, when Fred died. Asked him if he had the strength to be there for his grieving mother and his friends that lost a boy they considered to be more of a family than their actual family. And he wasn’t. The world devoured George Weasley, but in turn George Weasley continued to devour everything that was left of himself.

Maybe that’s why it’s such a surprise when he sees Lee standing there, underneath the awning of his shop seemingly waiting for George. If there’s nothing left of him, either because of death or because of his own self-inflicted abuse, then surely things like surprises are everywhere even if George can’t truly allow himself to be surprised anymore. Everything that ever could have happened to him happened when Fred died, therefore no more surprises could hurt or shock or baffle.

And yet there’s Lee Jordan, standing with his shoulders hunched and his hands in his pockets as he stares inside George’s shop with such a sad face that it makes George think that maybe he can experience other people’s sadness just as much as he experiences his own. Maybe Lee and George have souls that lay together outside of themselves because of the pain of the war and losing Fred caused them both. Souls that live inside each other because of a sadness experienced differently but still experienced nonetheless.

He doesn’t have to say anything when he reaches Lee, all he has to do is look at Lee’s face to know why he’s there. Still though, all George can think is that he wants Lee to say it out loud, to give his suspicions a fundamental reason. 

The other man’s face is sunken, bags under his eyes puffy and dark purple. Lee looks like he hasn’t slept in years, and George looks the same. His friend’s eyes are slightly glassy but other than that his face is stoic, not even a hint of his once brilliant smile to be seen. The last time George saw Lee, they were sitting on the floor of Lee’s living room sipping on hot whiskey and watching one of Lee’s favorite Muggle movies involving some very attractive vampires and really bad wigs. It was a nice night, probably the only time since Fred’s death that George remembered feeling anything close to happiness. And after that night, they never spoke again.

It wasn’t a gradual loss of contact, it was sudden and honestly without much reason but it happened nonetheless and neither man had made an effort to fix the broken relationship, just like when they were in school and suddenly their romantic involvement was over without any discussion.

“You look like shit, Jordan.” 

“I don’t look half as bad as you.”

“Don’t you mean half as good? Because I don’t know about you but I’m pretty sexy.”

And that’s it, that’s all it takes for Lee to laugh and for George to smile, even if it is the smallest of grins. It’s still enough for them at the moment, and it will probably have to be enough to last a lifetime.

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this in like an hour so it's really bad lol i'm sorry. it's also the first thing i'm ever posting on ao3 so please be nice i know it isn't perfect but i'm trying. the poem george mentions is lady lazarus by sylvia plath and the movie he and lee watched was interview with a vampire.


End file.
